Books make great Christmas gifts: No one ever complains they’re the wrong size or color. Great books reveal themselves when their audiences expand beyond their assigned pigeonholes. Finally asking for guidance after dividing and quartering the fiction sections for 20 minutes, I can still remember having to crawl on my hands and knees through the [...]
I’m a tad too young to remember nickel Cokes, though I can remember when they were a dime. It’s tempting to say that in vending machines today “they’re now a dollar.” But in fact the four quarters you’re shoving in the slot consist mostly of copper and contain not a smidgen of silver, so your [...]
The Health Nazis have tried for years to discourage cigarette smoking — at the same time they greedily seize cigarette tax revenues to plug their budget gaps, of course — by placing more and more onerous warning labels on packages, forcing smokers to huddle outside in the snow, slashing magazine revenues by barring colorful ads [...]
In last week’s column, I’d walked into a local comics shop with some “Silver Age” Marvel and D.C. comic books from the early 1960s, comics with 10-cent cover prices theoretically cataloguing at hundreds of dollars each, but actually in typical “fair to very good” worn condition and thus not likely to retail at more than [...]
At the local mutiplex, the tightly edited “coming attractions” are often better than the real movies they advertise. Unfortunately, when today’s real-world “coming attractions” feature a fast-devaluating dollar, means-testing of “entitlements” (come back and let us know when you’ve sold your house and you’re living under the bridge), making it a crime to “hoard” wealth [...]
Retro clothes are not vintage clothes. Retro clothes are new-made garments designed to imitate or evoke the fashions of as bygone era — often, the 1940s, ’50s or ’60s. Vintage fashion is the real thing: sturdy garments well made in America (usually by union labor, if that matters to you) that remind us of an [...]
There are thrift shops in town with signs up, seeking to buy Michael Jackson LPs and other “related material.” They do this because people have been coming in since the “King of Pop’s” untimely demise, asking to BUY Michael Jackson stuff. I understand. But are Michael Jackson LPs a good investment? Unless they’re signed and [...]
About a year ago, a writer for one of the town’s less-than-everyday papers infamously reported with regret that the Reading Room bookstore at Mandalay Place inside the Mandalay Bay was closing, leaving Las Vegas without any independent booksellers. Las Vegas was not and still is not without independent booksellers, needless to say, and I’m not [...]
